“Progress in science and technology is real, but it builds on past truths without rejecting them. Computers don’t have to be re-invented in order to keep getting better; innovations expand what they already do. Knowledge accumulates, so it can increase. Scientists and engineers know this, but artists, authors, and philosophers keep trying to start over from ground zero in the humanities. Thus, they don’t really progress—they become primitive.”
“Many modern artists, philosophers, and theologians reject the knowledge of the past. Thus they must continually start over again from ground zero, their vision restricted to their own narrow perspectives, making themselves artificially primitive.”
“Such is how Science makes progress: not destroying the past, but learning from it, and building on it.”
“It wasn't science and technology that cause a slow progress, but collective knowledge of the society and market demands.”
“The opinions prevalent in one age, as truths above the reach of controversy, are confuted and rejected in another, and rise again to reception in remoter times. Thus the human mind is kept in motion without progress.”
“For such people, the ruling gods are progress, science, and development. They imagine that we know so much more about the world than those people of olden times, because "we" have science. Of course, they themselves do not have science, they have simply heard and believed that scientific knowledge is real knowledge. They know little about the goals and methods of science, and nothing about the Islamic Intellectual tradition. They are blind imitators in intellectual issues, that is, on the level where they should be striving for their own understanding. What is worse, this is a selective imitation, since they only accept the authority of the "scientists" and the "experts", not that of the great Muslim thinkers of the past. If Einstein said it, it must be true, but if Al-Ghazali or Mulla Sadra said it, then it can't be true, because it isn't scientific.”